Why are we still discussing Luke Skywalker’s change in The Last Jedi?

Although Mark Hamill may have some new insights as to what happened to Luke Skywalker, it seems like the debate in Star Wars fandom won’t stop.

Six months after Star Wars: The Last Jedi hit theaters, fans haven’t really stopped talking about the movie. There’s even some ridiculous campaign to try and redo it, which deserves no more than the space in this article that we’ve just given to it. And so, inevitably, the media is going to ask about the movie, too, and that includes asking Mark Hamill to talk about Luke Skywalker.

Now, IGN‘s headline calls Luke as he appears in The Last Jedi “weirdly tragic,” but the thing is … there’s nothing “weird” about it. Even Hamill himself calls the storyline “tragic” without any modifiers whatsoever.

The thing is, this isn’t the first time Star Wars has explored the idea of someone falling so far. Much as we knock the prequels, they are, in fact, a tragedy, admittedly in a slightly loose sense of the word because no one’s going to be repeating Anakin’s speech about how he hates sand like how we borrow “To be or not to be” from Hamlet all the time. (The previous link dives more into actual criticism, but let us take our snarky shots where we can get them.)

Granted, Luke’s tragedy is a bit more condensed so far — five films if you count his brief appearance from The Force Awakens, which per Hamill originally included a display of Luke’s power — but it’s not as though it shouldn’t be a surprise. Hamill has the real-world analogue right there to him, but it doesn’t escape this writer’s notice that IGN’s interviewer, Joe Skrebels, dubs this “a more unexpected” look.

It’s really not. Luke has always laid claim to his father’s legacy; you need not look further than “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

But that legacy is also one of darkness. Ultimately it’s a hopeful one at the end of the day, with Anakin dying to save his son (and I think Skrebel’s reading of Luke’s sacrifice as a “last stand” neglects that there are still sparks of the Resistance with or without him). Still, Anakin spends all of Luke’s life up to that point as Darth Vader. That streak manifests in Luke himself more than once; how is it any surprise that that brief consideration of killing his own family would shock him so much that he doesn’t want to be part of the world anymore, one that views him as a hero and a legend? (This is not a new idea — yours truly has written on it before, but not from the angle of tragedy.)

If Anakin’s tragedy is good intentions, then Luke’s is perhaps the tragedy of believing his story too much.

There’s a second angle to this, though, too; talking with Culturess’ editor-in-chief, Sharareh Drury, I stumbled onto saying something along the lines of surprise at why men all seemed so shocked about Luke. It seems to me that women’s relationship with Luke is fundamentally different on a lot of levels anyway, and perhaps we’re more open to seeing him fall, too.

Leia losing her son and husband doesn’t seem to qualify as “tragedy” in the same way, because women don’t always get those happy endings so long as they do everything right. Skrebels himself doesn’t really interrogate his use of that story-based argument when it comes to Luke. But if Luke’s life is tragic, then so is Leia‘s.

And yet it’s Luke who’s the surprise.

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None of this is meant to discount the different experiences, but perhaps it’s time to interrogate why this is so shocking at a deeper level than just looking for real-world analogues.